Artist Statement

I am a large-scale figurative painter focusing in working-class representation. I exclusively render found photographs from my family’s past. When choosing a photo I look for signifiers pointing to working-class experience (i.e. mass-produced commodities, pop-cultural iconography, etc.). I also look for subtle humor.

Gentrification’s impact on my Brooklyn neighborhood has incited an idiosyncratic nostalgia for the past, more specifically, the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Family photographs from this period function as relics—both archival document and a springboard for memory/visceral experience. Painting these images bridges a chronological gap in time and allows me to reconnect with events relegated to the past. My paintings also invite a public voyeurism into a very private/personal world. Overall, my artistic practice aims to assert my identity as a working-class female, as well as convey a subversive and conflicted sense of longing to the viewer.

Education

CUNY Queens College, MFA, Studio Art, 2011

CUNY Hunter College, BA, Studio Art, 2005

Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and the Performing Arts, Art, 2000